Conlangery #87: Quantifiers and Determiners

This week, we do a little talking about determiners, a topic that has come up before in many episodes but that we hadn’t really treated on its own. Also, we get to reading some iTunes reviews we’ve been forgetting about.

6 Responses to “Conlangery #87: Quantifiers and Determiners”

Jyri

An interesting addition to what might function as determiners are the possessive affixes as they are used in many Uralic languages. In many of these languages the use of a possessive affix does not have to imply any possession. The non-possessive uses of the possessive affixes are traditionally described to denote definiteness, though a better description is that they only indicate identifiability.

There’s a paper on this subject by Irina Nikolaeva (Possessive affixes in the pragmatic structuring of the utterance: Evidence from Uralic) where you find sample sentences like

As “something” is inherently indefinite, the use of the possessive affix -əl cannot indicate definiteness but rather marks the unstated object of cooking as something specific that can be specified further. To me this doesn’t sound to be too far from what Squamish does with its identifiable-to-the-speaker article. Neither use has to indicate definiteness and when something is identifiable to the speaker it’s not in practice very far from becoming identifiable to the listener as well.

The possessive affixes used in this manner can be quite mobile as can be seen from attaching to pronouns and stacking with possessively used possessive affixes in the following examples:

Clearly this use of the possessive affixes deals with some quite complicated pragmatic issues and is likely very language specific. I don’t know what it actually means to attach an identifiability marker to a personal pronoun.